4 Tips for Living a Semi-Nomadic Lifestyle

The dream of a nomadic, or more often, living a semi-nomadic lifestyle is extremely prevalent and popular these days.

No longer content with the idea of living in one town for their entire lives? Vast numbers of people are keen on organising their lives in such a way that they can spend big swathes of time out on the road. Seeing new places, meeting new people, and living lives of adventure, with periodic stints at home in-between.

Maybe you know some people who have been successfully living this kind of semi-nomadic lifestyle already. Or maybe you’ve just seen them on Instagram or some other social media platform? Showing off beautiful location after beautiful location every other week.

If you, too, dream of living a semi-nomadic lifestyle, here are some suggestions for making it work for you.

Find a job or a working arrangement that allows for remote working

A life of neverending travel is a true dream for so many of us. But who really has the means to take months of vacation time a year to jet off? Or otherwise retire early and finance such a lifestyle simultaneously?

One key issue with the dreams of globetrotting that are so popular these days, is that they so often focus on a difficult to determine and predict a point in the distant future. “When I’ve saved up for decades and retired, what I’m going to do is…”.“If I can make a success of my company while I’m young, then I can retire early…”.

By all means, it’s a great thing to have ambition and vision. But it’s simply impossible to predict the future even in the short term, never mind decades down the line. By moving your dreams of a life on the road decades into the future, you might well be robbing yourself of the opportunity to experience that lifestyle altogether.

So, what’s the solution? Well, as Tim Ferriss suggested in his highly-acclaimed book “The 4-Hour Work Week”, the real solution might be to change up your working arrangement today, so that you can work on the go (and also streamline your professional life in the process).

The key thing here is to find a job, or figure out a working arrangement with your current employer, which allows for a remote working situation.

That way, you can keep working, and keep earning, with nothing but your laptop, from anywhere in the world. If you’re dedicated with how you structure your days, you can get a productive day’s work in, and experience the local culture, all in one.

Try to spend a while in each location

As a general rule, living a semi-nomadic lifestyle is more tenable when you commit to spending a decent amount of time in each location before moving on. This rather than hopping from place to place on a daily basis.

Some of the reasons for this are pretty straightforward.

For one, when you’re spending the majority of the year — or even just several months at a stretch — travelling, you’ll need a degree of stability to deal with all the usual obligations of life, including things like balancing your budget, sorting out your taxes, dealing with your responsibilities back home and corresponding with friends and family, and, of course, working on the go.

By spending a while in each location, you introduce an element of stability to your life and make the whole situation much more manageable.

Rapid-fire backpacking, where you wake up somewhere new every day, can be fun, no doubt about it. But it’s also not the kind of lifestyle that is necessarily sustainable when you’re trying to stay out on the road for prolonged periods of time while leading a balanced life at the same time.

Look for functional houses or apartments to stay in, rather than hostels.

This point is closely connected to the previous one here. But if you’re going to be spending a while in a particular location, it’s also important that you stay in a place which can serve as a functional home and “base of operations” for an extended period of time.

You can find houses for rent in Singapore and other places, at rates which might be quite reasonable and manageable for you. But apartments would work as well.

The key thing is that you have your own space, have room to store your clothes and belongings safely. You also have the ability to prepare your own food, work, plan, do your laundry, and attend to all the various obligations that naturally come with life.

If you were planning to live your semi-nomadic lifestyle out of hostels, you might find that everything would be much harder to keep in balance. Keeping your preferred bedtime might be difficult if other guests are partying and coming and going at all hours. Working productively would be very tricky. Security might be a concern over the long term, too.

Accustom yourself to a fairly minimalist lifestyle

One of the “mental shifts” that seems, more or less, to be essential when it comes to living a successful semi-nomadic lifestyle, is to adopt a fairly minimalist ethos. You don’t need to travel with nothing other than a toothbrush and a wallet. In fact, that would likely be a pretty bad idea for various reasons.

But you would be better off if you didn’t set yourself the expectation of bringing all the comforts and conveniences of home out on the road with you. Including things like all your favourite outfits, your DVD collection, a set of dumbbells, your hot water bottle, etc.

The more you take with you, the more you have to carry around from place to place, the more attentive you have to be to all of your belongings, the more likely you’re going to be weighed down or distracted at some point, and the more tempting a target you are likely to be to thieves. Of course, take what you need with you. But be mindful of what can be left behind and what’s really important for the trip. A good book or two, plus an e-Reader, is likely a better option than trying to carry your whole library with you.

Are you thinking of living a semi-nomadic lifestyle?

In conclusion, living a semi-nomadic lifestyle is easier than you think. As long as you think long term you could be living a semi-nomadic lifestyle in no time.